Grow-A-Game: A Tool for Values Conscious Design and Analysis of Digital Games

The Grow-A-Game paper presents a card-based tool developed by the Values at Play project to help designers and analysts consider the moral, social, and political values embedded in digital games. Its central thesis is that games communicate values through both narrative and mechanics, and that deliberately attending to these values during design and analysis produces more coherent and impactful work. The authors ground this argument in media effects research, game studies scholarship, and philosophy of technology, drawing on examples such as Winner's Robert Moses bridge and Flanagan's Giant Joystick. The tool's four card categories of values, verbs, games, and issues are used to frame design challenges, and the authors observe that imposing unusual constraints often stimulates rather than hinders creative solutions.

The paper's most substantive evidence comes from a series of case studies in which the value cards, including compassion, generosity, humility, and empathy, prompted students and professionals to examine how stories and rules either reinforce or contradict particular values. Participants using the cards tended to produce games in which narrative and mechanics expressed values more consistently, and a student-led analysis of Shadow of the Colossus was associated with more innovative final projects. These findings are qualitative and anecdotal, drawn from instructors' and participants' observations rather than measured outcomes, so they should be read as illustrative rather than statistically established.

A further strand concerns the Layoff and Cabbies games. Observation of players revealed two broad approaches to Layoff: some treated it as a matching puzzle, while others read character biographies and deliberated empathetically. The authors also report that concentrating on a single value, such as empathy, tends to yield clearer and more affecting games. A student designer's work illustrates that embedding empathy in mechanics, such as language barriers that complicate navigation or affect income in Cabbies, proved more effective than reliance on narrative cutscenes. The conclusion is that values can be conveyed through rule systems as well as story. The cards have been adopted across educational and professional settings, and the paper's scope reflects this primarily North American and academic game design context.